ribed to them, they certainly neither
appreciated nor published their exploits. Their colony, wherever it was,
endured but for a day, and it, with its locality, speedily passed from
knowledge in Scandinavia itself. America had not yet, in effect, been
discovered.

[Illustration: The Old Stone Mill at Newport, R. I.]

[1300]

We must remember that long anterior to Columbus's day unbiassed and
thoughtful men had come to believe the earth to be round. They also knew
that Europe constituted but a small part of it. In the year 1260 the
Venetian brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo made their way to China, the
first men from Western Europe ever to travel so far. They returned in
1269, but in 1271 set out again, accompanied by Niccolo's son, a youth
of seventeen. This son was the famous Marco Polo, whose work, "The
Wonders of the World," reciting his extended journeys through China and
the extreme east and southeast of Asia, and his eventful voyage home by
sea, ending in 1295, has come down to our time, one of the most
interesting volumes in the world. Friar Orderic's eastern travels in
1322-1330, as appropriated by Sir John Mandeville, were published before
1371.

Columbus knew these writings, and the reading and re-reading of them had
made him an enthusiast. In Polo's book he had learned of Mangi and Far
Cathay, with their thousands of gorgeous cities, the meanest finer than
any then in Europe; of their abounding mines pouring forth infinite
wealth, their noble rivers, happy populations, curious arts, and benign
government. Polo had told him of Cambalu (Peking), winter residence of
the Great Khan, Kublai--Cambalu with its palaces of marble,
golden-roofed, its guard of ten thousand soldiers, its imperial stables
containing five thousand elephants, its unnumbered army, navy, and
merchant marine; of oxen huge as elephants; of richest spices, nuts
large as melons, canes fifteen yards long, silks, cambrics, and the
choicest furs; and of magic Cipango (Japan), island of pearls, whose
streets were paved with gold.

[Illustration: Globus Martini Behaim Narinbergensis 1492.]

[1456]

Columbus believed all this, and it cooperated with his intense and even
bigoted religious faith to kindle in him an all-consuming ambition to
reach this distant Eden by sea, that he might carry the Gospel to those
opulent heathen and partake their unbounded temporal riches in return.
Poor specimen of a saint as Columbus is now known to have been, he